Those attending the COP24 climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland, this week have been greeted by a bizarre sight: an artistic celebration of one of the main fuels responsible for destroying the global climate. Katowice is the centre of Poland’s coal industry, and despite hosting a conference that represents the last chance saloon when it comes to taking meaningful action on climate change, local politicians pride themselves on the black stuff. Perhaps we could have expected no different when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change decided on such an inappropriate venue and to allow coal companies to sponsor the talks.

If we do make it through climate change with some form of civilisation intact, we will look back at some of the things we are doing now with the moral repugnance we feel towards slavery. There are legitimate parallels here. Climate change will most hurt those yet to be born. Our failure to make the dramatic changes needed to our economy and society means we are behaving as if we own the lives of future generations and have a right to steal their lives from them.

Art plays a key role in recording contemporary life, but because it is exploratory and imaginative it also invites us to challenge the assumptions we live by. In Katowice there is a counter-exhibition on coal by art students, drawing attention to the “dark side of coal”. Meanwhile the campaign movement Art Not Oil, which has been pushing for an end to oil sponsorship of the arts, ran a parallel protest exhibition alongside the British Museum’s I Object show in opposition to financial backing from BP – a company that proudly boasts it is one of the most significant corporate investors in UK arts and culture. Performers acted as “rebel curators”, presenting objects to the public that represent BP’s complicity in climate breakdown. Just as in Bristol, where the Green lord mayor, Cleo Lake, has banished paintings related to the slave trade from her office, so galleries should shun BP funding.

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Musicians are also challenging corporate sponsorship. Neil Young is due to play a large concert in Hyde Park next summer. Recently he criticised the event’s sponsor, Barclays, declaring the bank a “fossil-fuel-funding entity”. Young said such sponsorship was incompatible with his beliefs about the climate, and that he was seeking to rectify the situation. Yesterday he claimed victory, saying the concert was now proceeding without Barclays as a sponsor.

Others need to follow his lead. And perhaps Young and other musicians concerned about climate change will also need to think carefully about the carbon footprint of performing concerts around the globe.

There’s also a strong case against continued fossil fuel sponsorship from an economic perspective. The financial sector is rapidly divesting from fossil fuels, realising the smart money is in renewables and the green economy. Since the Paris agreement was adopted in November 2015, the sustainable finance agenda has moved rapidly.

In the European parliament I’ve worked on legislation that requires all financial market players to give full information about how customers’ money is invested. Since the EU has committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2050, any pensions for people aged under 40 that contain assets based on fossil fuels could be claimed to have been mis-sold. So decisions not to throw money at fossil fuels are increasingly looking hard-headed and rational rather than purely moral.

There’s also a growing divestment movement, and universities and colleges have been at the forefront. Almost half of UK universities have made divestment commitments. Students and academics of the arts can play a vital role in pushing this agenda, again using their talents to do this in creative ways.

No matter how much they are struggling for cash, galleries and arts promoters should be made to feel too ashamed to take money from the industries that are leading us to climate breakdown. In the same way we now look back on the slave trade, those who took the filthy fossil fuel lucre will be condemned by future historians.

But the arts sector must go further than simply seeking clean sources of funding. Artistic creation invites us to imagine alternative worlds and to subvert the power of the old. Envisioning a future where fossil fuels have no place in our economy or society could provide a rich creative vein for artists and musicians, allowing them to play a vital role in generating ideas about how we are to live in the post-fossil fuel era.

• Molly Scott Cato is Green party MEP for South West England