Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani to Visit THE KUDLOW REPORT Tonight

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Following is the unofficial transcript of a FIRST ON CNBC interview with Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani tonight on CNBC's "The Kudlow Report" (M-F, 7-8PM ET). Additionally, here is a link to video of the interview: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000126638.

LARRY KUDLOW, host: Welcome back to THE KUDLOW REPORT. Let's get right to our special guest this evening. We welcome now first on CNBC America's mayor, of course, the former mayor of New York City, my great friend Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy, Michelle and I don't want to spend the whole segment on this, but as you probably know, there is a saucy story--that's what I'm going to call it-that today Michael Bloomberg on grounds of environmental--on grounds of global warming--has endorsed Barack Obama. Do you think this has anything to do with getting FEMA money and paying for all of New York's infrastructure, or what strikes me as an odd time for the mayor? It's like, doesn't he have anything better to do?

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani: Well, I don't know. You'd have to ask Mike exactly why he wanted to do it on that--on that basis. You know, it seems to me there were some other issues that were pretty darn big like what's going on in the Middle East, a disaster in the Middle East, a disaster in Libya, the disaster to our economy that this president has brought about, his inability to really set forth a plan for the next four years that makes any sense. And you want to talk about this particular issue that we're going through, his absolutely just say no to any form of expansion of energy, which is the reason why we're having such a tough time recovering. Michelle just made the point before about this aging infrastructure that we have. Well, we haven't rebuilt it, not because we don't have the money to do it, we haven't rebuilt it because all these groups oppose every single thing you want to do. If you want to build a new generator, they oppose that. If you want to build new transmission lines, they oppose that. God forbid you should build a new nuclear power plant. Oh, my God, oh.

KUDLOW: But that's what Bloomy is saying. I don't mean to cut. That's what Bloomy is saying. When he goes down this road of global warming and he also mentioned, Rudy, cap and trade. He is saying we're going to put limits on the volume of energy, all energy, including, you know, the new fracking energy for natural gas. This is an era of limits. It's anti-growth. And New York City doesn't need anti-growth policies and neither does the rest of the country.

Mayor GIULIANI: Well, the reason for the difficulty in recovering right now is that we are always at the breaking point on energy.

MICHELLE CARUSO-CABRERA: Mm-hmm.

Mayor GIULIANI: I knew this when I was the mayor. I built 10 new generators as a result of that. I really pushed to do it by the New York Power Authority. Where--and this is not just true of New York, it's true of all throughout America. We operate at the limit. Now some of that is economics because it costs money to buy that excess energy, but some of it is also that excess energy doesn't exist because we haven't built a new nuclear power plant in 30 years.

CARUSO-CABRERA: Right.

Mayor GIULIANI: We haven't expanded transmission lines, we haven't modernized. And a lot of that is because--I would call them not the environmentalists, the extreme environmentalists who oppose it and just block it completely.

CARUSO-CABRERA: What do you think of the situation in New York City right now, how it's been handled? And when you were mayor, was there an on the shelf plan in case we got hit by a huge hurricane like we have?

Mayor GIULIANI: Well, sure. I mean, the city's had hurricane plans for 40 or 50 years. We had several hurricanes. This has been an enormously intense storm, so I don't know there's really any really good comparison to it. I think that--I think--it seems to me the emergency plan has worked pretty darn well, particularly during the emergency. The length of time for the recovery is a systemic problem that should be cured. And the length of time for the recovery, some of that is due to the fact that we don't have as much sources of energy as we should have. We should probably have 10, 20 percent more than we have. And the reality of that is that's been a long-term opposition to really redeveloping our infrastructure.

CARUSO-CABRERA: Mm-hmm.

KUDLOW: That's the thing. Mayor, I just want to go there because we were talking about this in the last segment. Regarding the role of big government, which regulates all the MTA rates, it regulates Con Edison, it regulates all these infrastructure operations, it is the exact opposite of a free market and it seems to me at crises like this, the negative consequences come out. We don't have what we need because we don't charge what we need in a free market.

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