Scholars concerned with the government abuse of their “resource privilege” sometimes call for national sovereignty over the natural resources that lie within its borders.  While such claims may be able to resist a key driver of the “resource curse” when applied to mineral resources in the ground, and so are often recognized as among the set of human rights, their implications differ in the context of climate change, where they are invoked on behalf of a right to extract and combust fossil fuels that is set in opposition to climate change mitigation imperatives.  Moreover, claims to national resource sovereignty conflict with commitments to an equitable sharing of national burdens associated with decarbonization, since much of the planet’s greenhouse emissions absorptive capacities lies within national borders, and maintaining exclusive rights to national carbon sinks would entail objectionably inequitable resource sharing assignments.  In this paper, I shall explore this tension between an egalitarian justice principle that is often applied to mineral resources and its tension with contrary principles that are often applied to carbon sink access (another natural resource), developing an analysis that seeks to reconcile what would otherwise appear to be fundamentally incompatible aims.