Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has reversed his position on off-shore drilling in the wake of the BP oil-spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Schwarzenegger now says that he no longer supports an effort to open California’s coast near Santa Barbara to new oil drilling. The governor had backed the new drilling because it would generate about $100 million in state tax revenues. But the new money, he said yesterday, according to the Chron, isn’t worth it:

“You turn on the television and see the enormous disaster, you say to yourself, ‘Why would we want to take that risk?’ The risk is just much greater than the money is worth, and so we will figure out how to deal with the extra $100 million problem.”

But the question is — why does it always seem to take an environmental disaster for some Republicans to realize that progressives were right all along? Even the conservative National Review, which still supports offshore drilling, admits that “Drill, Baby, Drill,” made famous by Sarah Palin in 2008, “has lost whatever usefulness it may have had as a slogan.”

Schwarzenegger, however, didn’t make liberals happy across the board yesterday. The Chron reports that he also vetoed a bill that would have banned smoking in nearly all state beaches and parks, calling it an “improper intrusion” on people’s lives. And he refused to sign on to a boycott of Arizona over its new draconian anti-immigration law.