Overall, climate denialist or climate sceptic framing could not be detected in articles covering climate change except in 1 article in the corpus. This makes sense because Malaysia, like many other developing countries, did not go through a period of political engagement with climate denialism or scepticism. Global warming and the climate change issue did not originate as a local discourse. The absence of denialist frames can also be attributed partly to the low levels of public awareness and understanding of climate change (especially prior to the Paris Agreement in 2015) which meant that political and democratic engagement with climate change was low. Climate change communication studies view the scarcity of climate denialism in developing countries as a positive phenomenon when compared to the challenges posed by climate change politicisation particularly by denialist networks in the West. However, these studies ignored the fact that climate politics was already taking shape invisibly through the hegemonic engagement of technocratic and elite actors in Malaysia. Consequently, hegemonic perspectives saturate and guide political discourse on the climate. Maeselee and Peperman stated that the presence of powerful fossil fuel industries influence the expansion of denialist and sceptic network on climate change as demonstrated in the example of the US. But the same has not happened in Malaysia. This study has observed that despite the strong consensus on the science on climate change, media coverage of climate change systematically avoid speaking about the negative effects of Petronas, the national oil company, directly and indirectly. Whenever Petronas is mentioned, it is always within the context of its struggle against the current green transition atmosphere. Petronas’ public ownership could explain the difference in this treatment. From an ideological perspective, this exhibits both the undemocratic practices of the ruling regime to cling on to the carbon pollutive but lucrative industry and at the same time the whole-of-nation hesitancy in coming to terms with the full effects of its (destructive) carbon dependence.