There's something about those powers of 2, though... oh yea, that's right, they're exponential :)
So use 2048-bit keys as the post you referenced suggests. Or 4096, or 8192, or whatever level makes you comfortable. Now for most of us who might want to use a public key present PGP is limited to 1024 bit (it's the old command line one that was more robust) but if you actually cared about your data (like a company might be if its competitors were snooping) and not just encrypting everything just to make life difficult for snoopers, you could use more since your recipient would expect it.
Of course if everyone is encrypting, even if its all breakable with some effort, it's not feasible to scan through everything. Thus EU is putting a stop to that possibility.
Or, to put it another way, the fact that they are bothering to pass laws like this is an indicator that breaking crypto is not yet incidental to various governments.
Or that they'd rather just spend the 10 billion instead of 20 billion next year to update their equipment.