Eh, as someone who’s been vegan for a couple decades, ascetic for a solid chunk of that time, and active in various other ways to greater or lesser degrees, people will still shut down mentally when they don’t have the hypocrisy lever to pull.
People in the reactionary/denialist/antagonistic camp will just end with “okay yeah you’re right but I’m not changing/I don’t actually care/I accept that I do evil and shrug”.
People looking to inspire positive change being required to be perfect saints lest they and their movements be condemned seems like a hint that human psychology is not tuned to rise to this occasion.
That expectation of perfection is unrealistic. Humans are messy and bound to be hypocritical in countless ways.
The CEO of Phillip Morris may volunteer at the local children’s hospital and feed the homeless on weekends.
Yet his hypocrisy in doing good in his personal life while doing so much harm in his professional life doesn’t seem to interfere with his ability to do harm, in fact it likely helps.
The executive director of the nonprofit children’s hospital going out on weekends and beating stray dogs to death with a pipe, well his hypocrisy may very well end his ability to do good in his personal life.
It seems like we’re just destined to let people who do bad things without any pretense of doing good off the hook, while crucifying anyone who dares try to do a moral good who isn’t somehow perfectly aligned in their lifestyle, ideology, and entire life history. Despite the fact that the former may represent a large net negative to our world and the latter may represent a net positive.
TLDR: Even if the climate activists weren’t hypocrites, your friends would likely be no closer to embracing the terrible reality of climate change and the necessity of painful sacrifice to address it.