It's more like investment, especially if it saves jobs. It can be a win-win. Companies have it easier time switching to EV manufacturing, which helps those companies and the environment. Manufacturing jobs are saved, both giving a living to a lot of people and helping communities and saving on benefit payments.

Could of course backfire or go to shit but investments like this from states seem like a very wise move imo.

It’s tying up capital that could be used elsewhere

I'm not sure that's the case when you're the government and can and do print money. Not every rule of finance applies to the entity that gives credibility to the currency in the first place. This is also why the concept of governmental debt is much less meaningful than the concept of individual debt.

My ice vehicle is nigh 2 decades old and besides wear parts my total investment on repairs is under $500. I'm still getting 30 mpg and although I'm not anti electric 15 years of no car payment is hard to beat.

I was just listening to a Parenti lecture where he talked about an interaction he had with someone who had been in high up in East Germany. He basically asked, “why did you put out those crappy little two cylinder engine cars?” And the ex-officials response was essentially, “we didn’t want to put them into cars at all, we thought if we provided an adequate public transportation system, that people would be satisfied, but they weren’t so we had to do what we could.”

I agree with you fully, that public transport would be the ideal solution, far and away above electric vehicles, which just providing one for every household in the US would require such s massive amount of material extraction that it by itself will cause significant climate outcomes, but, we must find a way around the impulse for private personal transportation that exists within people, and I don’t know how to do so. Moving without the mass of people could lead to rejection and reactionary movements. Moving with the mass will lead to climate destruction. How do we work with the masses to come to a compromise that allows the support of the masses, while reducing the number of private vehicles to nearly zero?

That’s a great way to do it, but that solution excludes a lot of people renting or in condo HOAs that don’t have easy access to overnight charge points in their complex’s or city’s lots. Hopefully those missing pieces are addressed soon so EVs feel like an option to everyone driving an ICE car, not just homeowners with garages.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth2

While I agree with the sentiment that EVs aren't the most efficient alternative in terms of lowering carbon footprint, they are definitely better than ICE vehicles for consumer use. They are even more so when you have an electrical grid running off of solar, wind, and water.

We get the majority of our lithium from an area that has zero life and has had no recorded rainfall. Their lifetime CO2 emissions compared to an ICE vehicle is significantly lower even using the most polluting power source. There is just no comparison.