Reagan Cline and Ben Weinberg had an epic time this winter on their monthlong trip through much of the American West. Making it sweeter was the knowledge that they neutralized the carbon impact of their nearly 5,000 miles of driving through Cloverly.
They know that they didn’t single-handedly solve the climate change crisis. But they took a step in the direction of sustainability. And they made a statement.
“If we can pay an additional dollar for every time we fill up the tank,” Weinberg said, “and that adds to the voices that are telling people who own land and the people who are working on our energy system that we want something that’s better for the environment, then it’s a dollar well spent.”
Weinberg, originally from Baltimore, and Cline, from Birmingham, Alabama, are product managers at Fleetio, a fleet management software company headquartered in Birmingham. They came to Fleetio as fellows in Venture For America, a nonprofit that trains recent college graduates to work for startups in emerging US cities. Their friend Lydia Zaleski, another VFA fellow, is customer success lead at Cloverly.
Carbon Offsets and Other Cool Stuff
“We heard about Cloverly through her,” Weinberg said, “and talked to her a lot about the carbon offsets and all the cool stuff that Cloverly was doing.”
Cline and Weinberg started their road trip in Birmingham at Christmastime. They headed west to Denver via Tulsa, Oklahoma, then snowboarded for a few days in the mountains of Summit County, Colorado, home of the renowned Keystone, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, and Arapahoe ski and snowboard resorts.
“Then we drove out to the desert in Moab, Utah, up to Park City, Utah”—where they spent a few more days on the slopes—”and then back to Birmingham via Denver and South Dakota,” Weinberg said. “We went through Omaha, Nebraska, and St. Louis, and then Nashville. So we hit a ton of cities on that last week back.”
Altogether, they traveled 4,900 miles in December and January. They fueled up Lenore (Cline’s 2014 Subaru Forester, named after the protagonist in the David Foster Wallace novel The Broom of the System) 16 times. And they paid a total of $20.59 to offset 18,25.867 kilograms (4,025.34 pounds) of carbon emissions.
To neutralize their carbon impact, they wrote a script in the Python programming language that integrated Fleetio’s mobile app with the vehicle endpoint of the Cloverly API. At each fuel stop, they entered mileage, amount of gas purchased, and cost into the Fleetio app.
At the end of the trip, they used their script to submit the final totals to the Cloverly API, which estimated the carbon impact and neutralized it with carbon offsets from the Doe Mountain Improved Forest Management Project.
The project involves the Doe Mountain Recreation Area, a multiuse nature attraction in the northeastern tip of Tennessee. Cline and Weinberg chose it because it was the closest project in the Cloverly portfolio to Birmingham. “We wanted to make sure that we were supporting the local, domestic carbon offset market,” Weinberg said. Maybe on a future trip, they said, they’ll visit Doe Mountain, just to check out “their” project.
Ease of Integration
Weinberg and Cline have computer skills. They do, after all, work for a tech company. But they’re not programmers. The ease of integrating with the Cloverly API pleasantly surprised them. “The documentation was awesome on the Cloverly website,” Cline said.
“It was my first time using Python and actually working with APIs,” Weinberg said. “We’re definitely not developers by any means. But it was cool that we were able to build something and actually have it work.”
Cloverly’s powerful, flexible API can handle a wide variety of use cases—including fleet transportation. As for Fleetio, Cline described the platform as “modern and user-friendly fleet management software, highly focused on usability, with mobile apps and all of the other features that you would expect from software built in 2021.”
Tracking and Improving Fleets
Weinberg added, “At our core, our mission is to help our customers achieve their missions—help them better track, analyze, and improve their fleets so that they can focus on what they’re best at.
“One of our North Stars is to make Fleetio a product that is easy to integrate with whatever other systems our customers may be using or want to use, whether it’s fuel purchasing or telematics—or, if they’re interested in offsetting their carbon, using a service like Cloverly.”
If you too are interested in using Cloverly to neutralize the environmental impact of your travel or other activities—whether or not you’re a developer—just use one of the options on our Contact page. We’ll help in whatever way you need.
As for their own trip, Cline said, “It was awesome!”
After months of social distancing and sheltering in place, it came at the perfect time. “I’ve spent a lot of days basically inside the 20 square feet of my apartment,” Weinberg said. “So being able to get outside, be active, and be in the mountains for an entire day was a really nice change from normal, everyday life.”
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