It's not necessarily hypocritical. You need to look at net carbon output. Perhaps that first-class passenger is buying carbon credits, maybe they own clean-energy companies and are travelling to expand their market.
Carbon credits are the Indulgences of the modern era. Now it's worry about harming the planet instead of worry of going to hell. My ethics happen to align with Martin Luthor on this topic.
I have some experience with this topic. I _did_ start a clean energy company that has had notable and measurable impact over the past ten years or so. And I have flown cross-country for work more often than I would like. It's justifiable to the extent the travel leads to benefits generated from the work. But the truth is that an honest personal accounting of this is difficult. In some cases, the travel is really valuable and in other cases we just want to imagine it is for ego-centric or other reasons. Regardless, flying first-class vs economy is really never needed for work purposes; it's purely a matter of luxury.
Causing harm for the purposes of luxury, attempting to buy your way out of it, and then claiming righteousness is, in my view, hypocritical.
I should mention that I am a fan of well-structured carbon offsets, but only when avoidance is really infeasible. But offsets do not justify waste in the same way that recycling does not justify greater consumption.
I'm not completely convinced. High-end purchasers often fund newer more efficient development, especially with cars and jets.
Old jets and old cars are much less efficient than their modern equivalents, and airlines need sufficient capital and demand in order to invest in new vehicles.
There's also the common misconception that buying a newer more efficient car is bad for the environment due to manufacturing. That is very rarely true:
We need to solve environmental issues by moving forward and innovating, rather than attempting to get 7.5 billion to agree to reduce their standard of living.
Indulgences did not actually offset the negative externalities, where as carbon-credits do, at least to a significant extent, so I'm not sure the two are directly comparable.
