The godfather of hardware was Frederick Terman at Stanford. Steve Blank has a great talk of the founding of silicon valley and Terman role in driving innovation (hint, radar's needs created the valley). These two people did not do the heads down work, but were really the two greatest product managers in history who had the resources of a nation as their development teams. For example Bush was the champion of the Manhattan Project so pretty cool having Oppenheimer as your technical lead on a project.
A very simple thing you can do to get the attention of the console makers is to call them and ask them how much power your particular system draws when playing and when sleeping, how this will cost you where you live, what you can do reduce the power usage, how to enable deep sleep mode and when they will come out with a reduced power model. Also let the game makers know that you want them to support auto power down.
BTW, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is really an amazing environmental group. They are just the environmental group that shows up at those deadly dull EnergyStar standards meetings and they do it with a full time electrical engineers. The NRDC engineering team is very bright and well informed. Very much worthy of your support.
Apply for a job: Think the the hiring manager doesn't google you to see if you are "their kind of people?" Think what religious affiliation you do or do not have fails to influence if you get the job? Think your membership (or lack) in the NRA might make the difference?
As these personal information aggregaters are able to provide more and more details about your most personal and private life and these conclusions become more and more available to those who have significant impact on your life what happens if that information is wrong? How do you continue to have a private, thoughtful and reflective life if you can not even explore ideas without consequences. What happens when a "friend" of a "friend" of a "friend" gets labeled as a Nazi or a child molester? Are you now tared? How much time, fear and money will we scrubbing our e-reputation like we now have to do our credit reports for fraud and false reports? Will companies sell me their product or provide cell service if I am likely to give them a bad review? Why should it matter to an employer or the government what books I read at night?
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne