You're right about one thing...
Corporations and manufacturers selling expensive fluorescent bulbs are quite enthusiastic about having the government force people to buy their products. There are a lot of examples of this out there.
Far too many corporations are perfectly happy to use government force when it wrecks a competitor of benefits their bottom line.
I will concede that environmentalists are probably more "useful idiots" in some of these deals than anything else.
If you really want to see an environmental-government-industrial mutual backscratching, look up the history of the Superfund program.