How many Eurobureaucrats does it take to change a light bulb?

Such irony. Once upon a time it seemed likely that forcing people to buy, and then to pay to dispose of, compact fluorescent lamps would be highly profitable for certain people in the EU, such as Messrs. Philips of the Netherlands, who manufacture them, and the mysterious organisations which arrange their safe disposal (they being rather more hazardous than the average waste).

Of course the lumbering, self-serving bureacracy of the EU takes forever to do anything.

So the measures now being put in place to coerce people into using this really rather twentieth-century lighting technology, in order to maximise the profit of the EU’s proprietors, were conceived some time ago.

What has happened since is that the designs of Philips and others (on Wikipedia, of course, it says that the thing was invented by, and stolen from, a lone American genius; if only the Cold War were still on there would be a Warsaw Pact version of Wikipedia, in which everything was invented by, and stolen from, a Russian) have long since been copied by the Chinese.

Who, it turns out, (thanks to Apocalypse Nowish) are now limiting exports of rare-earth metals.

The triphosphor coatings which give CFLs their good colour indices are ‘made with’, as the litigious world now insists we say, rare-earth salts, particularly those of europium.

So one might expect the ability of Philips and others to manufacture triphosphors (also used in modern fluorescent tubes) to be somewhat affected by this, perhaps to the extent of leaving the market to the Chinese (which must be the latter’s intention).

Of course, the anonymous Eastern European billionaire who owns all of the CFL recycling facilities in Europe will find his profits unaffected.

What I wonder is: how (when this penny eventually drops) will the EU continue to protect his profits, and the associated brown envelopes, from the light-emitting diode?

My money’s on a health-scare. Any other bets?