Transport... Okay. The large leaves, from stalk to leaf tip, can be a very great distance. To move water and nutrients from the root zone, up the plant, to the ends of these large leafs requires work. Work requires energy. It's physics. The large leafs MUST dedicate a deal of their energy to this transport of water and nutrition so they can remain healthy.
What you do not understand is leaf hydraulic conductance in the whole plant system. If you did understand such things you would not have said what you did. Your inaccurate beliefs and growing practices cause breaks and choke points in the hydraulic system in the plants that move nutrient rich moisture and essential carbohydrates and other elements throughout the plant.
You simply do not understand what actually causes the moisture and nutrients and various elements to move the distances you referred to. It is not plant energy being used. It is transpiration where the loss of water through evaporation in plants, especially through stomata draws, pulls, hydraulically pumps a corresponding amount of water up through the roots and up through plants in a process in which the water vapor escapes through the plant via its stomata and lenticels into its external environment, the atmosphere, the air.
You also ignore, or totally fail to understand, the extreme importance of the linkage between plant hydraulics and the extremely important gas exchange that needs to occur. When you limit or stop one, the exact same happens to the other.
To put it into a form you might be able to understand, if you had a small bucket of water with a rag half in the water and half out of the water, water would wick up through the rag and the water in the portion of the rag that is out of the bucket would evaporate and that would draw more water up from the bucket, up through the rag to also be evaporated until the small bucket of water would be empty, it would be dry. The rag would not be expending any energy whatsoever, it would be simple evaporation, which basically is what plant transpiration is.
A plants system is far more intricate and elaborate but it is still the same basic function. What moisture is drawn out of a plant through transpiration draws more moisture up through the plant.
What you consider to be unnecessarily used energy, or wasted energy, is, in simple plain language, actually much needed hydraulic pumping stations powered by transpiration performing highly important tasks to keep the flow/movement/relocation of nutrient rich moisture and stored carbohydrates and other elements maximized throughout the entire plant.
Your beliefs totally ignore things like the basics of phloem transport, the generation of hydraulic pressure gradient in collection phloem, the maintenance of hydraulic pressure gradient in transport phloem, the manipulation of hydraulic pressure gradient release phloem throughout the entire plant ..... and you also ignore, or do not know of, much, much more. Those functions, along with others, rely on the functions of the very leaves that you believe to be not only unimportant but also a total waste of energy and objects that block light rays. You wrongly believe that energy is used, wasted in your words, to transport, to move, to relocate moisture and nutrients, starches/carbohydrates from what you like to give the impression are extremely long distances from one location on a plant to another location on a plant requiring the use of large amounts of energy that could better be used for other more productive purposes. But in fact those elements are drawn to the various areas they are needed and used through natural transpiration.
Those functions rely on leaf transpiration to draw moisture nutrients/sugars/carbohydrates up through plants, all the way from the plants roots right up to the very top of the highest leaf/stem or cola. When you remove leaves you highly limit a plants capability to do that. You greatly damage, by reducing the size and capabilities of, or totally removing, the plants natural hydraulic system.
Plants are extremely intricate structures where each separate part, each separate but highly interconnected function, no matter how minor you may personally happen to believe them to be, are highly important and extremely reliant on each other and the reduction of any capabilities, or the total loss/removal of any of the many, many extremely important interconnected functions, is highly detrimental to the proper function and maximum functionality of the plant as a whole.
I fully realize that all of that is way over your head, and I fully realize that you will refuse to accept those facts, so this is my last comment on the subject because I will waste no more time on someone who absolutely refuses to accept scientifically proven botanical facts. But realize it or not, accept it or not, your personally chosen beliefs have just been proven to be both incorrect and inferior to what others, like Uncle Ben, have preached for ages and ages and what others, including myself, have also said.
Unlike your self concocted and or personally chosen beliefs, the above is actual botany, put in as simple of language as possible and still be able to explain how plants actually work.
Thus endeth the lesson.
