From the Pathology of Plenty to Carbon Metastasis

Lys Kulamadayil’s The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law (TPP) offers a fundamental reconstruction of how international law is constitutive of – rather than merely responsive to – the uneven distribution of both the benefits and harms of natural resource extraction. The book demonstrates that foundational doctrines, such as permanent sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination, are historically embedded in postcolonial political economy. Kulamadayil argues that international law’s role in resource-rich states is constitutive, preventive, remedial and punitive (p. 131), creating the legal infrastructure through which the so-called resource curse – the paradoxical observation that countries with extraordinary mineral wealth often experience economic stagnation, political violence, and human misery – is reproduced across generations.

In this post, I situate Kulamadayil’s critical intervention within the context of accelerating climate breakdown. Building on the book’s use of illness metaphors to describe the political economy of extraction, I argue that the pathology of plenty has expanded beyond territorially bounded resource sectors as carbon metastasis. This shift reflects extractivism’s transformation from localised “sacrifice zones” to a global system in which emissions circulate and generate distributed harm. By conceptualising the atmosphere as a natural resource within the scope of international law, I show how its systematic exclusion from existing legal frameworks has enabled its appropriation. The result is a managerial, market-oriented approach to climate governance, under which the global economy continues to treat the atmosphere as an effectively unlimited sink despite clear evidence that its absorptive capacity has been exceeded. This dynamic is steering the world toward a form of climate apartheid, in which the costs of a fossil-fuel-based economy are unevenly distributed along historical and geopolitical lines, with those least responsible bearing the most severe consequences.

The Atmosphere as a Natural Resource

A central premise of TPP is that what counts as a natural resource and its governance is historically contingent and legally constructed through specific political and economic struggles (p. 28–41). The book traces how, during decolonisation, newly independent states fought to have mineral resources recognised as subjects of sovereign control rather than imperial appropriation, culminating in the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources (UNGA Res 1803 (1962)).

Yet the atmosphere – despite being essential for life and a finite sink for greenhouse gas emissions – has seldom been treated in international law as a natural resource. Aside from limited engagements, such as the ILC Draft Guidelines on the Protection of the Atmosphere and earlier discussions in the 1971 UN Report on Natural Resources, the atmosphere remains conceptually external to resource governance. This omission has spatio-temporal, distributive consequences. While international law has recognised territorial sovereignty over extractable resources, it has failed to address how cumulative, territorially bounded extraction has effectively appropriated the atmosphere otherwise conceptualized as a shared resource. Former empires that sustained their capitalist economies through carbon-intensive exploitation became fossil-dependent, high-emitting states occupying a disproportionate share of the global carbon budget during their industrialisation without corresponding legal obligations to redistribute or compensate. This dynamic reflects how historical responsibility for past and current emissions translates into enduring structural advantages, including political clout in international law-making.

The doctrines that TPP examines reinforce this asymmetry. The principle of permanent sovereignty presupposes territorially bounded, ownable resources, while self-determination assumes that peoples may dispose of their natural wealth within state borders. The atmosphere, being a global commons, fundamentally exceeds these assumptions since it functions as an unlimited sink into which emissions from all sources accumulate, despite its finite absorptive capacity. International law has thus not treated atmospheric capacity as a resource subject to allocation, but as an externality premised on lawful extraction-based development, in which planetary boundaries fall outside the scope of governance.

International law’s engagement with the global commons has historically been managerial. Even in more developed regimes, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), governance has often prioritised use over distribution. That said, recent developments indicate some doctrinal evolution. The ITLOS Advisory Opinion on Climate Change (2024) affirms stringent due diligence obligations to prevent marine pollution from greenhouse gas emissions, suggesting an emerging recognition of shared responsibility and elements of environmental trusteeship. Yet, these developments remain forward-looking and procedural. They are thus limited in their ability to address the irreversibility of past atmospheric occupation or to provide mechanisms for restitution or reparative justice.

Kulamadayil’s analysis of how uti possidetis entrenched territorial inequalities offers a parallel (p. 26-28). Just as naturalised arbitrary colonial borders and the unequal distribution of resources they enclosed, the absence of atmospheric sovereignty has naturalised the unequal appropriation of carbon space. High-emitting states have effectively enclosed a disproportionate share of atmospheric capacity without legal challenge, while low-emitting states – many of them former colonies – face the consequences in the form of climate coloniality.

Seen in this light, the pathology of plenty is not only about the failure of resource abundance to generate prosperity, as TPP argues, but also about the unaccounted atmospheric costs of extraction. The degraded atmosphere thus reveals how international law has enabled both the expansion of carbon capitalism and the externalisation of its consequences. The failure to recognise it as a fragile, shared natural resource underscores the limits of existing legal frameworks in addressing climate breakdown.

The Legal Thread between Resource Curse, Carbon Metastasis and Climate Apartheid

TPP can be extended to show that the resource curse is a structural condition that enables climate apartheid and carbon metastasis. What appears as “Dutch disease” or petro-state corruption is a symptom of a deeper legal-economic order that locks resource-rich states into extractive and carbon-intensive development pathways (p. 10–13).

International law is a node within this interdependent process. As TPP shows, regimes governing investment, finance, and resource contracts have historically incentivised fossil fuel extraction and export-oriented production, while constraining diversification and nationalisation efforts (pp. 36, 78–82). This legal architecture produces a form of carbon lock-in, whereby state revenues, infrastructure, and political settlements become dependent on extractive sectors, rendering decarbonisation structurally difficult even when it is recognised as necessary.

The extraterritorial impacts of this system are evident, especially when emissions produced at extraction and production sites disperse through the atmosphere, causing widespread and delayed harm. TPP begins with the metaphor of “plenty” as a pathology or disease (See Chapter 2), foregrounding the language of illness to underscore a metabolic disorder within a system. By extending that metaphor to climate breakdown, the material to draw upon is the biogeochemical role of carbon.

Carbon is indispensable to life, forming the molecular basis of organic matter and regulating Earth’s climate through the carbon cycle. Pathology arises from the disruption of this cycle through the rapid, large-scale accumulation of atmospheric CO₂ driven by fossil fuel combustion – a capitalogenic perturbation that alters radiative forcing and destabilises climatic systems. A heuristic parallel is metastasis, the spread of malignant cells resulting from uncontrolled growth and the breakdown of regulatory constraints. Likewise, the expansion of carbon-intensive production under conditions of unchecked accumulation produces systemic instability. In both cases, harm stems not from the substance or process as such, but from the loss of regulatory balance.

In the climate context, this accumulation is materially embedded in fossil capitalism and legally stabilised through regimes that prioritise investment protection, resource extraction, and capital mobility. Carbon metastasis thus reframes the pathology of plenty, whereby abundance is not the source of crisis. Rather, it is the systemic inability to regulate the accumulation of capital and carbon within planetary limits. Under these conditions, the pathology of abundance becomes planetary, as ecological costs are externalised across space and time, producing climate apartheid: those least responsible for cumulative emissions suffer the greatest harms, while those most responsible retain the capacity to insulate themselves.

International Climate Law as Managerial Continuity

The contemporary international climate regime – anchored in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement –does not fundamentally disrupt this structure. Instead, it manages it. As Julia Dehm argues, these instruments institutionalise “an unequal appropriation of atmospheric space,” with 92% of excess emissions accruing to the Global North. The Kyoto Protocol’s flexibility mechanisms, including the Clean Development Mechanism and emissions trading, further embedded carbon markets that commodify atmospheric capacity, allowing emissions to be traded as property rights rather than eliminated at source.

Kulamadayil’s analysis of how international investment law protects foreign property rights in extractive sectors offers a crucial parallel (pp. 122-128). Just as bilateral investment treaties lock in protections for fossil fuel infrastructure – allowing companies to sue governments for climate policies that threaten their expected profits – the architecture of international climate law protects the interests of high-emitting states and fossil capital. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) acknowledges historical inequality in a formal sense, but operates within the same growth-oriented, market-based framework that produced the crisis. This formal recognition of inequality does not translate into enforceable redistribution or constraints on continued high emissions, allowing structurally advantaged states to preserve their developmental trajectories. As a result, CBDR functions as a stabilising device that legitimises unequal carbon use within a hegemonic global economic order.

The climate regime, thus, legitimises the reverberation of colonial patterns of extraction, dispossession, and unequal exchange through new “green” infrastructures and carbon offset projects. Northern states and corporations continue to appropriate atmospheric space while externalising the costs onto the Global South, now reframed through the language of “climate finance,” “adaptation assistance,” and “loss and damage” – mechanisms that systematically underfund the actual needs of vulnerable communities while reinforcing donor–recipient hierarchies.

Kulamadayil documents how the New International Economic Order (NIEO) campaign of the 1970s – led by resource-rich states such as Algeria and Iran – sought to restructure international economic law to benefit postcolonial states (Chapter 4). While the NIEO achieved some normative victories, including stronger recognition of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, it ultimately failed to transform the material structures of the global economy. Contemporary climate negotiations exhibit a similar pattern, in which rhetorical commitments to justice and equity through the principle of CBDR coexist with institutional arrangements that preserve Northern economic privilege and fossil capital’s veto power over decarbonisation.

Concluding Remarks

Kulamadayil’s The Pathology of Plenty demonstrates that the resource curse is a structural effect of international law itself – produced through the interplay of sovereignty doctrines, investment protections, contractual regimes, and financial architectures. Extending this insight to climate breakdown reveals the continuum of the pathology, whereby extractive inequality has persisted and reached a planetary scale. The systematic exclusion of the atmosphere from the legal category of natural resources has enabled the externalisation of carbon emissions, transforming territorially bounded extraction into a global condition of carbon accumulation that underpins climate apartheid.

Attempts to address this condition within the existing climate regime remain fundamentally limited. Market-based mechanisms, voluntary commitments, and technocratic governance reproduce the very logics of accumulation and externalisation that generated the crisis. The problem could be diagnosed as a structural continuity that paves the way for reconfigurations of international law’s normative foundations, making room for ecological interdependence, imposing material limits on extraction, and radical shifts in democratic decision-making in production at a planetary scale.

Without a strategic, long-term commitment to reconfiguring certain governance foundations, the risk of regressing gains is significant. More recent examples of resource autonomy can be seen in the Latin American “pink tide”, which complicates any simple rejection of sovereignty over natural resources. These counter-hegemonic efforts showed that resource nationalisation, combined with redistributive policies and active involvement in international law-making, could partially counteract the resource curse. They also revealed the limits of such strategies. External pressures – such as sanctions, financial constraints, and market discipline – along with internal contradictions, including the marginalisation of Indigenous and local communities, sustained extractivist dependencies in new forms. The shift towards rights of nature, plurinationality, and alternative cosmologies in international forums marked a significant normative break; however, it remained rooted in an extractive developmental model that proved difficult to move beyond.

This tension is now rearticulated in the so-called green transition. The shift away from fossil fuels is increasingly dependent on the large-scale extraction of “critical minerals” such as lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth elements – often located in the same regions that have historically been subjected to resource exploitation. Without a transformation of the legal and economic structures governing extraction, the risk is a transition that decarbonises energy systems while reproducing patterns of dispossession, ecological degradation, and unequal exchange.

Kulamadayil’s genealogy provides the analytical tools to confront this dilemma. By revealing how international law has constituted, rather than merely regulated, extractive inequality, it opens the possibility of reimagining law as a site of ecological and distributive transformation. Whether this can be achieved within existing legal structures or requires more fundamental ruptures with their colonial and capitalist foundations remains the central question.