Following Hubbert's historic presentation, industry movers and shakers began a crusade to discredit him. Oil executive Morgan Davis and later his intellectual stooge, Richard Gonzales, traveled in Hubbert's footsteps attacking his prediction venue after venue. Davis would use executive privilege to insert himself into special events. He was a vendetta on a soapbox.

In Hubbert's words: "About a week after this meeting in San Antonio, Morgan Davis gave a talk to the local geophysical society in Houston. In it he refuted or dissented from the paper that I'd given the preceding week in San Antonio." Davis attacked Hubbert on the grounds that his estimates were much too low. "From that time on, any time I talked at any public gathering, I could count on a rejoinder from either Morgan Davis or Gonzales usually within a matter of a week or two. It was almost funny, in a sense, that here was the highest individual in the largest operating oil company in the United States, and I was simply a researcher. Yet I was commanding the attention of these people almost full time!"

The efforts to discredit Hubbert came also from the U.S. government. Notably, from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s, the United States Geological Survey and its Director Vincent McKelvey pushed expansive estimates for United States oil reserves that were based on the assumption that discovery in the future would be of similar scope as the past. The McKelvey estimates dwarfed Hubbert's figures by a factor of three. Mckelvey and others made sure that these "armchair discoveries" (as Hubbert would later refer to them) were highlighted alongside Hubbert's estimates in the Executive Summary of the National Academy's 1962 report on energy to President Kennedy even though McKelvey's estimates were not mentioned in the body of the text.