Cap-and-trade legislation isn’t the only side-effect of the climate change debate that may complicate life for farmers and ranchers.

In fact, the livestock industry is already beginning to face another repercussion: bad press.

Livestock production is becoming regularly cited in the media as a major contributor to global warming, with cattle bearing the brunt of the accusations.

The source of this information: a 2006 report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization titled, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.”

According to the report, about 18 percent of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming can be attributed to livestock production.

“This is a higher share than transport,” stated the report.

Animal rights groups have seized upon the report and heavily promoted it in their campaign against animal agriculture, said Tamara Thies, chief environmental counsel for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

“They’re the biggest pushers of this information,” she said. “They’ll glom on to anything to make a point.”

What is seldom emphasized by the media is that the U.S. cattle industry isn’t causing deforestation – a major climate change culprit in the FAO report, Thies said.

“What they say applies on a worldwide basis, but it doesn’t apply to the U.S.,” she said. “We can’t account for what they do everywhere else in the world.”

Furthermore, the U.S. cattle herd has been shrinking since the 1960s while greenhouse gas emissions have been rising, said Gregg Doud, NCBA chief economist.

As a whole, crop and livestock agriculture in the U.S. only generates about 6 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases, and livestock production is responsible for less than a third of those emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

“What we try to do is put out the facts,” said Thies.

Animal rights groups, meanwhile, say that confined animal feeding operations aggravate the climate change problem by consuming energy for “lighting, heating, cooling automated machinery for feeding and water and ventilation,” according to the Humane Society of the United States.

These groups are continuing to use the FAO report as ammunition for their arguments against animal agriculture, and have even attacked former U.S. vice president Al Gore, a climate change advocate, for not sufficiently denouncing the livestock industry.

“Mr. Gore likes to be thought of as an environmentalist steak-and-potatoes kind of guy, but there’s no such thing as a meat-eating environmentalist,” said Bruce Friedrich, vice president of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in a press statement earlier this year.

“He needs to confront the ‘inconvenient truth’ that meat production is the main culprit in global warming,” said Friedrich.