Hot air

The balloon was equipped with a burner to create hot air for lift.

"You'll never get anywhere so long as youse trail with that reform bunch. It's all hot air and tomfool theory."

"You give me a lot of hot air about your conscience. Why don't you get a soap-box and preach on the street-corners?"

Some of the steam in Washington rises from real issues, but a lot is the hot air of partisan politics.

Klein diagnoses impressively what hasn’t worked. No more claptrap about fracked gas as a bridge to renewables. Enough already of the international summit meetings that produce sirocco-quality hot air, and nonbinding agreements that bind us all to more emissions.

I'm afraid I must disagree with Sir Michael Holden, for whom I have enormous respect, when he wrote in RAIL 977 that Transport Secretary Mark Harper's keynote speech for the George Bradshaw lecture in February was "a breath of fresh air". More like hot air to me, given Harper's emphasis on the private sector through both a kind of renewed franchising model and open access.