Haven’t watched the video, but as someone who works in industry in the US I think the consumer side of a metric switch is the lowest barrier to entry. A much bigger hurdle is the fact that almost all of our raw industrial inputs are built on the imperial system. Need to buy raw plate or bar stock to have something built? It’s sized in imperial. And if you want to source metric you’re either going to have to pay more for it or look outside the US. And after that raw stock is purchased and you send it to a machine shop that machine shop is almost certainly using exclusively imperial tooling and measurement equipment. You can do the fake metric thing that some companies do where you dual dimension all of your drawings, but those companies will usually still design to imperial so their parts can be fabricated in the US.
I’m absolutely not opposed to a switch to metric. I still perform most of my calculations in metric and then convert to imperial just for ease and because that’s how I was taught in school. But it’s certainly much more difficult than just deciding one day that we’re all going to switch.
One massive point that most people are completely blind to is that with energy considerations we are aggressively pursuing two very different goals that in many regards are directly at odds with one another.
The first goal is electrification, which can largely be accomplished by increasing renewables, investing in battery technology, etc. But in the US, we have also been accommodating the desire for electrification by massively increasing natural gas capacity.
The second goal is decarbonization. This requires us to also nix natural gas from the equation at some point. In addition to the problems others have already mentioned (like the fact that renewables aside from hydro are not viable base load power options right now), there is a significant chunk of our energy infrastructure that simply cannot be satisfied in any regard purely with renewables. Like the huge number of industrial processes that need process heat to achieve their end product.
So the best solution is energy portfolio diversity. We can steadily continue to phase out heavy polluters for electrification, but if we want to truly decarbonize, industry demands a solution that can still produce high heat without emissions. Nuclear is a woefully under-exploited technology in that regard, but it is potentially a great solution.