There's plenty of quotes around which go along the lines of "If every house in America replaced five of its conventional lightbulbs with low-energy compact-fluorescents, it'd be equivalent to taking 100000 cars of the road." Now that is vaguely reasonable (100000000 households, 5 bulbs, saving say 40W each, for 8 hours per day)... BUT it overlooks the fact that the energy-saving per participatory household per day is much the same as if they drove their car one less mile per day. And the fuss and hype about low-energy is vastly more than about cutting road-miles.
Personally (as a colour-scientist and photographer among others) I can't stand the quality of light from fluorescents. But since I don't own a car, I cycle or walk everywhere, share a very modest house with three people, and keep the heating pretty low, I figure I can be forgiven for my love of tungsten!